Arriving for its Berlin world premiere with heightened urgency in the light of Donald Trump’s disgusting appeasement overtures towards war criminal Vladimir Putin, writer-director Kateryna Gornostai’s Timestamp is a richly detailed observational documentary that chronicles a school year across war-torn Ukraine. A deeply moving yet refreshingly unsentimental portrait of courage under fire, it should be required educational viewing in the White House.
Moving from fiction to non-fiction following her feted coming-of-age debut Stop-Zemlia (2021), Gornostai roams far and wide across her homeland, capturing bittersweet but frequently uplifting scenes of students and teachers defiantly maintaining a sense of normality, despite the distant thump of artillery and regular air raid sirens. The only documentary in the Berlinale Competition this year, and the first Ukrainian entry in the Golden Bear race for almost three decades, Timestamp is a quietly powerful piece of work that should find plenty of play after Berlin, not least as part of the valuable historical archive of brave cinematic work chronicling the impact of Russia’s ongoing illegal invasion in real time.
Originally commissioned as a campaigning documentary for the educational NGO Osvitoria, Timestamp evolved into a more ambitious European co-production project, filmed on a grander scale in a more detached reportage style. Between April 2023 and June 2024, Gornostai and her small crew visit schools all over Ukraine. They observe bombed-out classrooms and cramped air raid shelters, but also inspirational lessons, brave teachers, sweet teenagers posing for selfies, first kisses, songs and pageants, proud parents and sunny graduation ceremonies. They visit Bucha, the site of a notorious massacre early in the war, not to dwell on tragedy but to witness a charming English language class. In Ukraine’s second city Kharkiv, where Russian occupiers were forced out in May 2022, but still the target of regular shelling, they find an entire pop-up school relocated inside the subway system.
Amidst all this heroic resilience and stoicism, Timestamp inevitably finds sourness, anger and sadness too. In one sequence, exasperated parents protest the long-delayed opening of a new school in Zaporizhzhia, intended to replace a previous building destroyed by Russian bombs. Another moving scene captures the heartbreaking funeral parade in Romny for a beloved school principal named Tatiana, killed in another Russian air raid.
The war itself never appears on screen in Timestamp, though its wider impact is ever-present. Serving military officers deliver guest lessons in schools, but they mostly share their hopes for a peaceful future, with no hint of recruitment propaganda. The film’s title refers to part of a medical tourniquet, a vital tool to preserve blood-starved tissue. It features fleetingly in one scene, where schoolchildren are calmly learning how to stem blood from a wound, a small but depressing detail from the new normal of life in the shadow of Russian imperialist aggression.
By avoiding formal interviews or explanatory captions, Gornostai and her team inevitably get a little lost in their immersive two-hour mosaic of snapshots and subplots. Only a tiny handful of protagonists appear on screen more than once, so viewers may understandably feel overwhelmed by a sprawling ensemble cast list of teachers and students numbering in the hundreds. There is no single narrative arc here, no obvious emotional focus. All the same, Timestamp is assembled with a flowing, musical rhythm that achieves a powerful cumulative effect, like an ensemble portrait of a nation’s youth, a chorus of young people dreaming of peace in the middle of war.
Speaking of music, one of Gornostai’s strongest aesthetic choices is a specially commissioned score by Kyiv composer Alexey Shmurak, a series of luminous vocalese collages featuring three intertwined female voices. The film-makers originally suggested using a children’s choir, but time limitations meant Shmurak instead opted for a trio of professional singers: Kateryna Ryzuniak, Oleksandra Stetsiuk and Olena Tsygankova. Despite its tragic back story, Timestamp is full of beauty, compassion and joy as an act of resistance.
Director, screenwriter: Kateryna Gornostai
Cast: Olha Bryhynets, Borys Khovriak, Mykola Kolomiiets, Valeriia Hukova, Mykola Shpak
Cinematography: Oleksandr Roshchyn
Editing: Nikon Romanchenko
Music: Alexey Shmurak
Producers: Olha Bregman, Natalia Libet, Victor Shevchenko
Production company: 2Brave Productions (Ukraine)
World sales: Best Friend Forever, Brussels
Venue: Berlin Film Festival (Competition)
In Ukrainian
125 minutes
